Will Leshner: Radio

MT and the MetaWeblog API

So what does the MetaWeblog API do for "MovableType"? First, let me point out that MT does not yet fully support the MetaWeblog API. In particular, it doesn't support categories. More on that in a bit. But the best thing that the MetaWeblog does for MT is allow postings with title/link. The Blogger API doesn't support title/link. So if you post with Radio Poster to an MT weblog with the Blogger API you had to live with the fact that you couldn't add a title or link to your post. Back to categories. I'm not so sure categories are such a big deal for an MT weblog. They aren't quite as convenient for MT as they are for Radio. In MT, a category isn't much more than an archiving tool. If you diligently categorize all of your posts, then later you can go back and provide special archives of your categories. But without some work, you can't really use categories as separate weblogs as you can in Radio. But in MT you can do something that may be as good: Create whole new weblogs. So I'm thinking that if I were to use MT instead of Radio I would create weblogs for my Radio categories. Then each weblog would have its own templates and calendar and archive. Plus, with a little work, I bet I can get Radio Poster to stream to multiple MT weblogs the way I now stream to multiple Radio categories. That might be a cool Radio Poster feature.

Radio Poster and MovableType

MT 2.11 is out. I upgraded and now Radio Poster can post to an MT weblog using the MetaWeblog API. Almost. It won't work with the currently shipping version of Radio, unfortunately. There's a bug in Radio Poster. Well. I didn't have anything to test it with except Radio, so a bug slipped through. The problem is that when posting with the MetaWeblog protocol selected, Radio Poster ignores the Blog ID field in the configuration tab and always uses "home" instead. That works fine with Radio, of course. But for MT I need to set the blog id or MT won't let me post. I'm going to release a new version of Radio Poster to fix this problem. But I'm trying to decide how much other stuff I want to add. I really want to be able to control multiple weblogs and right now you just can't do that with Radio Poster.

complaining-about-dave-winer parody

This is a hysterical parody of somebody whining at Dave Winer and UserLand. I guess we can easily forget that there's a limit to how much we can expect from UserLand for our $40. I think UserLand has raised our expectations by delivering so much. I suspect, though, that our expectations are out of touch with reality. As an example, to thank Radio users for their patience during the recent outage, UserLand upped everbody's server space from 20M to 40M. I had worried what would happen when we run out of server space for our weblogs but now I see that we should hope for more outages. A couple more and we should be up to a Gig of space in no time :) But the extra space is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

MT 2.11

Movable Type 2.11 has just been released. It supports some of the MetaWeblog API, which means that as soon as I upgrade my MT installation I'll be able to post using Radio Poster. I can't wait to give it a try.

finally back up

Looks like UserLand finally got everything back up and running. In particular, weblogs.com is back up. That's an important site. It when you update a Radio site it pings weblogs.com. Weblogs.com shows a list of recently-changed weblogs based on the pings it gets. And you don't need to be a Radio site to ping weblogs.com. That is a really cool service that UserLand is providing to the entire weblog community.

MT Templates, part 2

After calming down a bit, I decided to start over with my attempts to get MT templates that look like my current weblog. This time I decided to work with MT, rather than against it. I made small tweaks to the style sheet and low-and-behold, I'm beginning to recreate the look. I've got a ways to go, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. You can check out the results here. But realize I don't yet have any content in it. I need to get all of my posts from Radio and put them in MT. My plan is to add support for blogger.getPost to Radio Poster and then suck up all of my posts into files. From there I can reformat them into what MT wants for import. Somehow Jonathon Delacour got all of his Radio posts into MT and I really wish I knew how he did it.

What's the point of categories?

I have several Radio categories (REALbasic and Baba are two examples) and I even update some of them regularly. But I'm beginning to wonder what the point is. It seems like a cheap way to have multiple weblogs. With Radio, you can't really have multiple weblogs without paying $40 for each one. But with Movable Type, you can set up one MT and add as many weblogs as you'd like. MT has limited support for categories but until they support the MetaWeblog API (which they claim they will do in version 2.01), MT categories have little appeal for me. So I'm thinking that ultimately I should get rid of categories and have multiple weblogs, if my weblog environment supports it. I bet I can keep the content on them separated better if they are different weblogs and not just different categories of the same weblog.

Burningbird says "No" to Google

Burningbird is trying something new on her site. Well, actually a number of new things. One new thing is that she is moving her site to Movable Type. That's cool. I really like Movable Type. I threatened to move my site to MT before UserLand fixed the MetaWeblog bug. But I'm betting that I will have to move eventually. The other new thing Burningbird is trying out is a no-Google site. You can do that by putting a robots.txt on your site. If that file is present and formatted correctly, then robots like the kind Google send out to index the web can be told to go away. That's what Burningbird has done. She's decided that Google adds no value to her weblog and that in fact it brings visitors to her site that don't really want to be there. She may have a point. I'll have to think about that. Of course, I don't have control over the server my Radio weblog runs on, so I can't put a robots.txt file there if I wanted to. But if I ever move to MT running on my own server, then I'll have all the control I'll need.

Radio Poster's Compose Field

Anybody who uses Radio Poster, knows that the typing in the compose field slows down the more stuff you type. The REALbasic guys claim that's a problem with Apple's text engine and that Apple is working on it. Perhaps. But I can do something about it myself. I can use WASTEfield instead of REALbasic's EditField. WASTEfield is a plugin by Doug Holton that wraps WASTE, a replacement text engine for Mac OS. WASTE is used in a number of applications on the Mac (including REALbasic itself) and is quite mature. It doesn't have a problem with slowdowns when typing, but it also doesn't use ATSUI, which is Apple's going-forward text engine on Carbon. Unfortunately, there are problems with using WASTEfield with REALbasic 4.0.2, the current version. The problems appear to be solved in REALbasic 4.5, but I'm not ready to build Radio Poster with an alpha version of REALbasic. As soon as I can start using WASTEfield, however, I should be able to do quite a few interesting things. WYSIWIG editing is one thing I'd like to add to Radio Poster. Then you could just make things bold, or italic, or whaterver, and Radio Poster will figure out the tags for you.

Even more weird stuff

The previous post had a tag in the title and body. I was testing to see if putting angle brackets into a title worked correctly. First, it didn't work as I wasn't correclty turning it into an HTML entity. But it wouldn't work anyway as it would be treated as markup and not as content. So my "tag" ended up getting removed from the post. Actually, the tag is there in the data, but a browser, thinking it is a tag (that it doesn't recognize) strips it. This post has tags in the title but this time they are tags a browser understands. Can you guess what the tags are?

That last post ...

came from my desktop web page and it shows the 8-bit character problem in reverse. There, the body is fine but the title is messed up. That's got to be because Radio is converting the body to Latin-1 but not the title. The posts themselves live on the Mac, so they are probably MacLatin there. But when they go up to the cloud, they need to be converted to Latin-1 or they won't display correctly on the web. So the body is being converted and the title isn't. The problem, of course, is that I need to leave Radio the way it is for now. It works. But when UserLand fixes this bug I'll need to ship another version immediately to keep in sync. That's ok, though. I don't really consider this to be the same kind of problem as the MetaWeblog API bug, which, was a showstopper, in my opinion.

That Doesn't Work !

Well, as you can all see, that doesn't work. Very strange. It's almost as if Radio handles the body of the post as Latin-1 but the title as MacLatin. Actually, I'll be that's exactly what's going on. Why that just may be a Radio bug. I'm heading off to the discussion group to see if there's anything about it there. Wish me luck :)

More 8-Bit Characters: �Ӹ��

Now I'm converting the title to Latin-1 from MacLatin. Let's see if that makes any difference. My feeling is that I should be doing the conversion. The fact that I don't need to feels like a bug.

I don't know why ...

but 8-bit characters show up fine in the title's of my posts even though I'm not converting them to Latin-1. That's very strange. I could just be happy. But I'll feel better if I look into it a bit and convince myself everything is working correctly. For example, what happens if I do convert them to Latin-1? That's my next test.

Radio Poster Fixed

I figured out my problem. As you can imagine, I was sending Mac characters instead of ISO-8859-1 (or Latin-1 or, let's face it, Windows) characters as post data. Or well :) I think there may still be a problem with the title/link, though maybe not.

Radio Poster Bug

A Radio Poster user has pointed out a bug. Radio Poster doesn't handle 8-bit characters correctly. They end up wrong on the web. I'm looking into it right now. It might be a bug in Radio but even if it is I should be able to work around it. Nothing as serious as the recent MetaWeblog API bug, which UserLand fixed, thank you very much.

My Last Post

I couldn't get my last post to post. I was afraid it was a bug in Radio Poster's sockets stuff. It just couldn't connect for some reason. Other stuff, like IE, worked just fine. Then I remembered I had quit Radio on my other machine. After I started Radio things worked just fine.

Radio Poster 1.1

A test using Radio Poster 1.1 from Mac OS 9.

I See

I changed the day-level image and I meant to change the perma-link. Woopsy.

instant outlines

I think the idea of instant outlines is pretty cool. But what I don't like (and I may just be missing the point) is that you've got to suck up an entire outline to see any of it. I wrote a simple IO client in REALbasic, but the performance sucked because it had to get the entire OPML file, parse it, and build a table. Actually, it was pretty fast, but it won't be when somebody's outline gets to be really huge. And what happens when you've got a bunch of people's outlines. I guess the idea is to only do the get/parse/display when you open up a level. But I still don't think it scales. I think there needs to be the notion of my right now outline and my archive outline.

Using Radio Poster 1.1

I'm going to try using Radio Poster 1.1 for the rest of the day, just to make sure there aren't any problems before I release it. I already found one problem with the running it for the first time with the preferences for Radio Poster 1.0. I think I've got that fixed.

tired of Woodlands theme

I'm getting bored of my weblog's woodlands theme. Once again I'm thinking of mucking with the templates. I've gone down that path before and given up. I just don't have the creativity to do it right. But I'd like something far less busy. A simple white with a nice simple banner would be really cool, I think.

Radio Poster 1.1

I'm hard at work on Radio Poster 1.1. I hope to have it out in the next day or so. The code is written, I think. I just need to work on the docs. Documentation will be a challenge as I need to add something about setting up to talk to Blogger and Movable Type.

serious Radio Poster reworking

I've seriously reworked Radio Poster. I got tired of its hacked way of handling XML-RPC, so I wrote a library that sits on top of my XML parser. It can build method calls and parse the results. That makes the code a lot simpler and now I'll be able to handle other XML-RPC calls. I plan to add querying the server for blogid's and categories, and I want to support getting posts from the server as well. Things would have quickly gotten to be a mess if I didn't have a unified XML-RPC library to handle all of that. Radio Poster also now supports both the MetaWeblog API and the Blogger API. I can post to my Radio weblog with either (although I like the MetaWeblog API better, of course) and I can post to my Movable Type weblog as well (that one is a secret, sorry :) ). I've even got a test Blogger weblog and Radio Poster works with that as well. The support for all of those kinds of weblogs isn't right yet. Ideally I would have a list of weblogs you could post to. You would add all of your weblogs to the list and configure each. Then you'd hit a button and Radio Poster would query that server to get stuff like categories and blogid. Then you could start a new post by double-clicking on a weblog in the list. Your post window would already be configured correctly. But I don't have any of that working, of course, so for now you'll probably only really use Radio Poster with one weblog. You'll set that as the default with the default checkbox and all new windows you open will have that default server info.

That last post...

was from Radio Poster 1.1 using the Blogger API, rather than the MetaWeblog API. Pretty cool, eh? The problem with the Blogger API is that there is no way to specify title and link. There is also no way to specify categories. The MetaWeblog API is really the better API. I'm hoping all weblog servers support it eventually. Movable Type says they are going to support it in the next release.